Nerf the Immortal badge?

[Zhym]

This post on the current "quickest" way to get the Immortal badge (through 50 hours of AFK three-box farming) got me thinking:

 

 

First, I wonder if anyone has gotten the Immortal badge since Homecoming started up other than by multiboxing.  Is it even feasible to do it that way?  My badger is a DR/MC blaster who can handle about 40 dps, or roughly 144,000 damage per hour.  He's managed to take a little over 5,000,000 points of damage.  So to get him the Immortal badge without multiboxing would take about 659 hours of standing in fires.  That's technically possible, but it seems a little ridiculous.  I could make a second build around maximizing HP and regen, but even that probably wouldn't cut down the farming time for the badge.

 

Second, the Immortal badge doesn't seem like it could be gained in normal play—not the way the game is played today.  In the early days, when people might have thought of the game play as fitting the tank/damage/healer trio, maybe it made sense to think that players could take and be healed of 100 million (before Issue 16, 1 billion!) points of damage through regular game play.  But now that the focus is so much more on avoiding damage than taking it, does anyone get the Immortal badge except by farming it?  Take my badger, for example.  It's taken him 623 hours of game play (since January) to take that 5,000,000 or so points of damage.  At that rate, he could expect to get the badge through normal game play about 11 years from now. 

 

A badge that can only be obtained through farming, and can only be had in a reasonable amount of time by multiboxing, seems kind of broken.  Whether or not multiboxing is allowed or tolerated, the devs surely don't want to encourage it, right?

 

So how would I suggest fixing it?  I'd probably set 10,000,000 damage as the modern "Immortal" level.  That's enough that it's not easy to get and is still an accomplishment (or Achievement, technically) that doesn't require multiboxing.  My badger would still have to AFK damage farm for 34 hours or so to get that, but he could also get there through lots of game play. 

 

Here's the progression I'd suggest:

 

Badge	Current Dmg	New Dmg
Tough / Stoic / Slammer	100,000	100,000
Indestructible / Hard Case / Big Dog	250,000	250,000
Adamant / Ironman/Ironwoman / Laughs it Off	1,000,000	500,000
Unbreakable / Iron Willed	10,000,000	1,000,000
Nigh Indestructible / Concussed	25,000,000	2,500,000
Invulnerable / Marvel of Modern Medicine	50,000,000	5,000,000
Immortal / Challenger of Gods	100,000,000	10,000,000

 

That roughly doubles the damage needed for the next badge at each level.  If you want to keep Born in Battle as hard to get as it is now, that could be changed to require the Unbreakable badge instead of Ironman/Ironwoman.  But the new level of 500,000 would also reduce the number of people who have to damage farm to get Born in Battle (which I'm guessing is about everyone).

 

What do you think, sirs?

Edited July 25, 2021 by Zhym

[Glacier Peak]

 

This brings up an interesting area of discussion regarding badges, and perhaps even playing this game in general. How bad do you want it? That is what it comes down to. If you want the badge, or the build, or the fastest completion time, or the most PvP wins - it comes down to how much time and effort the player is willing to put in to it.

 

Back to the topic at hand though - I am comfortable with the current requirements for the Damage Taken badge set and don't support altering the requirements. This is partially due to knowing what the real Immortal badge used to require back on legacy (think 10 times as much as the current requirement) and partially due to the the relative effort I have to put in compared to other "epic" badge sets, such as Cataclysmic or the 'Master of..' badges.

 

Now, to be fair to your point, it is easier to get the Immortal badge using all available methods out there right now. The easiest being having multiple accounts to set healers to auto on the badger taking damage - but if a person chose not to use all available methods and handicapped themselves to using only damage taken 'while not taking advantage of easier methods' route, it would take a good deal of "normal" playing time in my opinion.

 

As @KaizenSoze so eloquently laid out on the last page of that thread you cited, the badge can be had in around two days of total time:

On 7/21/2021 at 8:20 AM, KaizenSoze said:

For folks jumping to the end of thread to see the latest.

 

To summarize the current quickest way to get the Immortal badge:

• Using the  Mercy Island fires that are  just south of the Fortified badge, that's the number four badge
  • You can achieve ~2 million points of damage taken per hour
  • ~50 hours to get the Immortal badge
• The fires are not visible until you complete Operative Kuzmin's level 7 arc in Mercy Island
• You need to position your character to take damage from two fires at once while resting to maximize damage
• You need to start a level 50 mission arc which includes all characters participating
  • Otherwise, your characters will go afk and get logged out in 30 mins.
  • I use Midnight's Hand because it allows a large level range 20-50
• You'll need two healers to keep you alive
  • I used to two pain domination defenders because they have an healing aura + strong single target heal
    • Set both healers to auto fire their non-self damaging heal and target the badge character
    • Make sure both healers are close enough for their AOE heals to work
  • That means you have to have three accounts or friends
• Due to rest changes in Issue 27 page 2. Rest will not be interrupted by damage. Position your character and hit rest
  • No break frees required
• After rest starts, you should see lots of ticks of 18 damage. A lot less than that and your character is not sitting in two fires
• The character's health bar will be dropping quickly, but the two healers should be able to keep you alive

 

Having played my main and badger since June 28th, 2019:

Spoiler

 

... and having used the above method (which I may or may not have been the first to discover 😁 said double fire patches), I can confidently say I have taken about 16 million damage outside of the badge requirement through "normal" playing. That may be due to my playstyle (ranged damage dealer) and I tend to solo content, and due to how often I play (3-4 hours a week at the moment).

 

So you're not entirely wrong, but you aren't correct either when you say it cannot be obtained through normal play - it will just take time. At the end of the day, my opinion of my badges is that I feel like I put in enough effort for them to matter to me to collect them. My favorite badges rank among Cataclysmic, Chronomaster, Toy Collector and Bug Hunter. Because I worked hard for those badges using whatever means or methods were required to do so. And I enjoyed it!

Spoiler

 

[KaizenSoze]

I do think that the damage taken, damage dealt, healing and time mezzed badges are ridiculously high.

 

They are interesting "problems" to solve, but it would take years of play to achieve most of them.

 

Damage dealt is the only I think could be reached by steady play in a year or two.

 

My Fortunata due to high defense had less than 5 million damage taken in over 200 vet levels. That is with a lot of soloing.

[Outrider_01]

10 hours ago, Zhym said:

So to get him the Immortal badge without multiboxing would take about 659 hours of standing in fires

PI paper mission, 2 CoT minions that use cold attacks set at -1/0, pop some purples to max +def, hit rest, purples wear off you can tank about 2 of them, at least on my brute, on a blaster it may be less, but the regen was enough to over come the incomming damage as Ice attacks recharge slow and health would be full before the next hit.  Took about a week AFK, far less then farming fire damage.

[tidge]

The only one of the "damage taken" badges that occupies any mental real estate for me is the 1M "Iron Man", and that is because of the disparity in effort between Born in Battle (redside) versus Portal Jockey (blueside). Between softcap Defenses and relatively low HP for many ATs, it is much more practical to run the AV missions in Peregrine Island than it is to collect one million points of damage.

[Zhym]

On 7/26/2021 at 2:18 AM, Outrider_01 said:

PI paper mission, 2 CoT minions that use cold attacks set at -1/0, pop some purples to max +def, hit rest, purples wear off you can tank about 2 of them, at least on my brute, on a blaster it may be less, but the regen was enough to over come the incomming damage as Ice attacks recharge slow and health would be full before the next hit.  Took about a week AFK, far less then farming fire damage.

Thanks for this.  I eventually figured out what I was missing about the CoT Guide method, which was that Rest caps regen (because of course it does—that's the point).  My blaster has been enjoying the tender mercies of a couple of CoT thorns for the past several days, taking about 449,000 damage per hour.  At that rate, it would take about 222 hours—or a little over 9 days—to get the badge from zero.

 

So I stand corrected: it is possible to get this badge without multi-boxing (hooray!).  I do still think that 100,000,000 damage is a bit over the top as a badge target, though, and am skeptical that anyone would get it through normal adventuring.  Maybe a regen tanker could, after years of play, but Homecoming's faster leveling and greater number of alts makes even that seem unlikely, IMO.  

[wjrasmussen]

On 7/25/2021 at 8:54 AM, Zhym said:

This post on the current "quickest" way to get the Immortal badge (through 50 hours of AFK three-box farming) got me thinking:

 

 

First, I wonder if anyone has gotten the Immortal badge since Homecoming started up other than by multiboxing.  Is it even feasible to do it that way?  My badger is a DR/MC blaster who can handle about 40 dps, or roughly 144,000 damage per hour.  He's managed to take a little over 5,000,000 points of damage.  So to get him the Immortal badge without multiboxing would take about 659 hours of standing in fires.  That's technically possible, but it seems a little ridiculous.  I could make a second build around maximizing HP and regen, but even that probably wouldn't cut down the farming time for the badge.

 

Second, the Immortal badge doesn't seem like it could be gained in normal play—not the way the game is played today.  In the early days, when people might have thought of the game play as fitting the tank/damage/healer trio, maybe it made sense to think that players could take and be healed of 100 million (before Issue 16, 1 billion!) points of damage through regular game play.  But now that the focus is so much more on avoiding damage than taking it, does anyone get the Immortal badge except by farming it?  Take my badger, for example.  It's taken him 623 hours of game play (since January) to take that 5,000,000 or so points of damage.  At that rate, he could expect to get the badge through normal game play about 11 years from now. 

 

A badge that can only be obtained through farming, and can only be had in a reasonable amount of time by multiboxing, seems kind of broken.  Whether or not multiboxing is allowed or tolerated, the devs surely don't want to encourage it, right?

 

So how would I suggest fixing it?  I'd probably set 10,000,000 damage as the modern "Immortal" level.  That's enough that it's not easy to get and is still an accomplishment (or Achievement, technically) that doesn't require multiboxing.  My badger would still have to AFK damage farm for 34 hours or so to get that, but he could also get there through lots of game play. 

 

Here's the progression I'd suggest:

 

Badge	Current Dmg	New Dmg
Tough / Stoic / Slammer	100,000	100,000
Indestructible / Hard Case / Big Dog	250,000	250,000
Adamant / Ironman/Ironwoman / Laughs it Off	1,000,000	500,000
Unbreakable / Iron Willed	10,000,000	1,000,000
Nigh Indestructible / Concussed	25,000,000	2,500,000
Invulnerable / Marvel of Modern Medicine	50,000,000	5,000,000
Immortal / Challenger of Gods	100,000,000	10,000,000

 

That roughly doubles the damage needed for the next badge at each level.  If you want to keep Born in Battle as hard to get as it is now, that could be changed to require the Unbreakable badge instead of Ironman/Ironwoman.  But the new level of 500,000 would also reduce the number of people who have to damage farm to get Born in Battle (which I'm guessing is about everyone).

 

What do you think, sirs?

 

Imagine a van with free candy spray painted on the outside.  Now inside, there is an npc who will gives away the candy.  The candy being whatever badge you want.

 

another option is to allow people to sell their badges on the AH.

[Outrider_01]

5 hours ago, Zhym said:

Thanks for this.  I eventually figured out what I was missing about the CoT Guide method, which was that Rest caps regen (because of course it does—that's the point).  My blaster has been enjoying the tender mercies of a couple of CoT thorns for the past several days, taking about 449,000 damage per hour.  At that rate, it would take about 222 hours—or a little over 9 days—to get the badge from zero.

 

So I stand corrected: it is possible to get this badge without multi-boxing (hooray!).  I do still think that 100,000,000 damage is a bit over the top as a badge target, though, and am skeptical that anyone would get it through normal adventuring.  Maybe a regen tanker could, after years of play, but Homecoming's faster leveling and greater number of alts makes even that seem unlikely, IMO.  

I only did one toon, but it was shorter than 9 days. Count doesn't reset every badge its 100m total from zero to final.. Hitting 1 million nets a badge, 99m more to go.  And so on.

 

If you respec in aid self, you can auto it.  Helps a little.  If you use another player with teleport, they could put you into a damage crystal with a couple of cot hitting you assuming the crystal doesn't do damage to them.

[Zhym]

32 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

I only did one toon, but it was shorter than 9 days. Count doesn't reset every badge its 100m total from zero to final.. Hitting 1 million nets a badge, 99m more to go.  And so on.

Just to clarify: I know the count doesn't reset with each badge.  I just meant that if I were starting with zero damage, it would take a little over nine days of damage farming with CoT Guides to go from no damage-taken badges to having all of them.  I'm at almost 69 million damage taken now, so I should have the badge sometime Tuesday unless I stop farming and, I dunno, actually play the game.

[aethereal]

On 7/26/2021 at 5:09 AM, tidge said:

The only one of the "damage taken" badges that occupies any mental real estate for me is the 1M "Iron Man", and that is because of the disparity in effort between Born in Battle (redside) versus Portal Jockey (blueside). Between softcap Defenses and relatively low HP for many ATs, it is much more practical to run the AV missions in Peregrine Island than it is to collect one million points of damage.

 

You also don't actually need to kill any AVs for portal jockey, you can do them all as EBs instead.